I don’t know where to start and where to finish. I’m supposed to be head of the department but in the technical sense I am a sysadmin. I find myself working on a simple task for days, weeks, and sometimes even months. I’ll start doing something and at the end of the day I’ll end up doing something completely else, leaving work completely frustrated because my superiors can’t get their priorities straight. Possible malware in-office? Who cares, setting up some stupid TV is the priority. Every day looks pretty much the same. I come in motivated, coffee gets me creative and moving and I start doing my job. The further the day goes, the harder it gets to work because of all the distractions. I started updating secure boot certificates 2 months ago. We did about 50% of the computers so far and the remaining half has to be done via Intune scripts because they were sent without secure boot being enabled. I keep working on it but every time I continue I forget what I was doing because I get so fucking distracted that it’s incredible. I’ll add specific models or firmware versions to a group and by the time I get to doing something about it, I’ll forget what is what.

I tried explaining a million times that within our department our roles are split. Everyone is supposed to have their duties and tasks they do. Hence - we have a ticketing system where people are supposed to report problems and depending on who is online from IT, whose job it is and depending on priorities, we would get back to them. But no… everything is always “urgent” and everything is always “important”.  If they send you an e-mail (because why would they send you a ticket? they’re above you so the rules don’t apply, you have to do what they say right away) and you don’t respond, they’ll send you a teams message or call you on the phone asking you whether you’ve seen the e-mail. They keep asking us dumb ass shit all the time just because it happened on a computer. Oh… a cooking recipe on my screen? Let’s ask the IT guys BECAUSE IT’S ON A MONITOR, AND A MONITOR IS CONNECTED TO A COMPUTER. 

We do most of the work when superiors are on vacation or not in office. When they aren’t there to ask you about their dumb ass ideas, you get more work done in 1 day than you would in a week or two when they’re present.

We organise within the department pretty well; we separate tasks according to category, priority, status, due date and assigned members. For us, it works amazing. However, we keep getting pushed around by superiors who ego trip over us and think they know what we should be doing instead. I’m talking about people who need to be told the monitor needs to be plugged into the power supply in order to work telling me how I should do my IT tasks. We have no productive or real meetings. We don’t sit with our superior or with someone who coordinates the company and talk to them about what we’ve done, or what we’re supposed to do in the following day, week, month, year. We have a weekly meeting where all supervisors from all the projects come and everyone just spats what’s been going on. I sit there for 1 hour listening to some colleagues going on leave, or some stuff inside their projects that I have nothing to do with. I sit there for 1 hour so I would get 2 minutes to say to all of them who don’t even understand or know what we’re doing in IT about what we’ve been doing for the last week. What should I tell them? In my opinion, especially when it’s something security related, nobody of these project leads should know about how we’re running the systems or what kind of systems we have. I don’t see a point in some dude working from home on a project where they take clothing orders, a project that has nothing to do with mine listening about where all our data is backed up. Recently I’ve just been saying something so general to them just to get done with it. 

We’ve asked multiple times if we can have separate meetings between projects (so the entire company wouldn’t be in one meeting but it should be split between departments that actually have something to do with each other), especially between IT and the administration (because we never do even though coordinating company policies between those two apartments should be done) but it’s been turned down. We still write our monthly reports and present them, but the dude just keeps jerking off on his phone and pretending like he’s listening. He’s always “multitasking” but forgets what you told him, or heck even what he said.

Another thing… the entire company is plain dumb to any standards or logic even though we have several standards covered and audited including ISO 27001. Again… the job of certifying was assigned only to us and nobody else gives a shit about it even though it’s INFORMATION SECURITY for the entire company, not CYBERSECURITY. We keep pointing to issues where they’re making security breaches and such but they just don’t care. 1000€ euros burned in a few months on licenses for inactive accounts, accounts being open even though the colleague isn’t working for months? Who cares… but let’s get rid of the guy asking for a 5% raise for doing his job right.

All in all, I feel like we’re being wasted. The only way forward here would be to ignore literally everyone, including the superiors, and focus on tech tasks in order to learn something for the next job. I feel like the more I stay in this job, the more my potential goes to waste. There is just no organisation and not enough tech work to keep learning efficiently. I feel like this workplace is too toxic and that I should move on. I care too much about things being right but they never will be, and I understand that after being ignored about important issues. It’s not a question whether shit will hit the fan, but when will shit hit the fan, and then it’ll be us fixing all the shit caused by their ignorance or by us not doing our job right because we don’t have an opportunity to do it right.

Other than this, there’s a million other toxic things within relationships that I don’t even want to get into, because it’d be a book about narcissists and ego trips. I’ll just ignore that part which leaves me constantly tired and in burnout and see what you guys will say about the stuff above. I just need perspectives on this.